The next time you do a fresh install of windows and all of your applications consider making an image of your installation as soon as you are done installing all of your drivers, commonly used apps, games, browers etc. 1. install/activate windows 2. install drivers 3. install all updates 4. install apps, games etc.. 5. check your system closely, make sure you have it exactly the way you want it with any tweaks and customizations and then use an imaging utility to create a backup of your system in this state. Now that you have your system exactly the way you want it make an image using one of the following. 1. Native W7 backup/imaging utility 2. Acronis True Image. 3. Macrium Reflect Free Edition. The logic here is that any time you do a fresh reload of a system it takes hours of installing, configuring and tweaking to get the system to a certain minimally acceptable state. If the next time after doing all this work you take 20 minutes to make an image then you will be able to simply toss in the W7 or recovery CD in the drive and restore an image in a few minutes. From the time it takes me to start my bartPE CD to the time I am playing COD4 is roughly 20 minutes. My system is completely restored to the system state of the image including activation.
You are right, dear thread opener. I always do backups of my fresh installed system. For Windows 7 i use Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Workstation. The latest build is compatible to run on Windows 7 and is doing the job very good, but note that there are some issues (e.g. archive browsing from secure zone is not possible). I have contacted Acronis and asked for a 100% compatible Windows 7 version, it will be released 5-6 weeks after the Windows 7 release on 22th October. For manual backups the current build works very good.
If you have a boot CD made with Acronis 11, it should work like a charm with Win 7. I have a boot CD made with Acronis 11 and a backup of Win 7 that I restored several times. I had no problems. Thumb up for Acronis True Image
There aren´t any problems when using Acronis on WinPE based boot CDs. The only problem is, that i am to lazy to boot the computer from CD every time i want to backup my system I prefer backups during booted up Windows so i can continue my work
Macrium Reflect supports W7. Only problem is that with the free version you have to build a bartPE disk with the macrium plugin or find one that is compatible with your system and will find your drives.
The point isn't backing up data, that should be backed up constantly. The point is to back up programs and the system state. It takes 30-60 minutes to load windows, in hour or more to install all of your apps, it takes me about an hour to install all of my games. It makes far more sense to image your drive in a freshly installed state with your common apps and all of your tweaks than it does to reload and manually do all of these things. I think it is safe to say that many of the people here go through a fresh installation on a regular basis. If you do it this way then a complete reinstall requires little user intervention and lasts about 20 minutes.
Thats good advice. I do that for years already (anyone remember good old DriveImage?) and it saved me from a complete reinstall more than just a couple of times. (Only downside is that after some time all the drivers and virus definitions etcetera are hopelessly outdated. So it wont last forever but still it can be a great timesaver.)
You`re right.However: I would not backup app and games.Well games maybe but not apps.The reason is that once you do a backup and apps contained there are say v1.2 and v.1.5. Once you do a restore those are restored but already apps 1.3 and 1.6 are out so you still have to reinstall and thus just making a mess of things. Better to install the newest version of apps from the start
I've been using GHOST for image backups since 1999 and I don't think I'll ever use anything else. With GhostViewer you can actually browse the image and copy files from it. If you accidentally erase or damage something from your PC (like your boot.ini), you can get it from the image without having to restore the whole system or muck about with your Windows installation disk and recovery options. IMO Norton Ghost rules them all.
Can you backup your programs with the Easy transfer your files of W7 and then restore them in a new fresh instalation of the windows?
No you cant backup all.As i said its very limited If a program sits only in /Program Files then yeah but if it has registry keys then its a no-go
Like i said before, use Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Workstation and make a full system backup, no matter what installed. After that you can do incremental backups, basing on the base backup you have done.
These days I use mostly small applications, many of them are stand alone without an installer and I keep them on a separate partition. The only large software suites I use are Office and... pretty much just office. The point about version conflicts and the need to update certain software is valid, if 6 months down the road you feel you need to make a new image then go right ahead, just make sure your system is clean and running good, you don't want to restore your computer to a previously f**ked up state on accident. Once a year or whenever a service pack is released it may be a good idea for some people to do a new, fresh install anyway and make a new image then.
Please tell me the Step by Step Guidance for making the Win 7 Image By Acronic True Image... I Shall be very thanks full